From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishpet project/theory/subjectpet project/theory/subjectIDEAa plan, idea, or subject that you particularly like or are interested in → pet
Examples from the Corpus
pet project/theory/subject• Even as the trajectory of his thought kept rising in the early seventies, the clock was ticking on his pet project.• No organization likes being told that it has got to hold back its expansion or abandon some pet project.• Different chemists prefer different pet theories, and there is no shortage of theories.• Even those Hippocratic treatises which inveigh against Presocratic dogmatism are themselves just as dogmatic where their own pet theories are concerned.• His pet project is a biotechnology institute in which state funding will be matched by contributions from the Schering drug company.• The proposals are seen as a pet project of the right wing of the Conservative Party and Conservative students' groups.• Both grants represented pet projects of two council subcommittee members.• Monitoring the telephone conversations of the Kremlin hierarchy had become one of his pet projects over the last few years. 