"Often children are not willing to talk about what is happening to them, but they will talk about their concerns about what they are seeing done to their pets," Professor Ascione said.
"I believe China is going through a Chinese animal liberation movement, a bottom-up movement, gaining huge momentum in the past year, very much with the help of the Internet and Weibo, together with the younger generation growing up with cats and dogs as family pets," Deborah Cao, a professor at Griffith University in Australia who studies animal rights law, said in an e-mail interview.
It includes the infertile as well as same sex marriages, and it is as good at excluding multiple spouses and marriages to siblings and pets as is Professor George's definition.
They are trying to understand how interacting with these pet impersonators - what Professor Turkle calls "relational artifacts" - affects the way people think about their human identity.
His films, including "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," "The Nutty Professor," "Liar Liar," and "Bruce Almighty," grossed more than a billion and a half dollars around the world.
It's an ambitious book with a pair of unlikely protagonists: a young sex offender, the Kid, who lives under a Florida causeway with an enormous pet iguana; and the Professor, an obese sociologist from the local university, who takes a curious and possibly sinister interest in the youth.
You might not expect these questions to haunt the mind of the director of "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "The Nutty Professor".
"It's a disparate group of very powerful people trying to pursue their pet projects," said Elliott D. Sclar, a professor of economics and urban planning at Columbia University.
"When you're giving to another person, you have this pressure of reciprocity, but it's not there with a pet," said Tracy Ryan, an associate professor of advertising research at Virginia Commonwealth.
Some critics have noted similarities between names in Septimus Heap and those in Harry Potter, such as Petroc Trelawney (Jenna's pet rock) and Sybill Trelawney (a professor in Harry Potter); also both series feature Boggarts (which are intelligent Marsh creatures in Septimus Heap and shape-shifters in Harry Potter).
