Animal fancy is a hobby involving the appreciation, promotion, or breeding of pet or domestic animals.
Fancy may include ownership, showing, trialling and other competitions, breeding and judging. Hobbyists may simply collect specimens of the animal in appropriate enclosures, such as aquaria, vivaria and aviaries. Fanciers with means may keep hobby farms or private zoos. There are many animal fancy clubs and associations in the world catering for everything from pigeons to Irish Wolfhounds; members may own many animals or none at all.
There are also many animal fancying hobbies that include keeping animals considered exotic pets, such an example of a rapidly growing hobby is herpetoculture- the keeping of reptiles and amphibians.
Read more about Animal Fancy: Organizations
Famous quotes containing the words animal and/or fancy:
“His reversed body gracefully curved, his brown legs hoisted like a Tarentine sail, his joined ankles tacking, Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of gravity, and moved to and fro, veering and sidestepping, opening his mouth the wrong way, and blinking in the odd bilboquet fashion peculiar to eyelids in his abnormal position. Even more extraordinary than the variety and velocity of the movements he made in imitation of animal hind legs was the effortlessness of his stance.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I have tossed hours upon the tides of fever,
Upon the billows of my bood have ridden,
Where fish of fancy teem as neither river
Nor ocean spawns from India to Sweden.”
—Vassar Miller (b. 1924)