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Seeing-eye and other service dogs have long been exempted from regulations that prevent dogs in certain places like restaurants and offices. But these days a lot of people appear to be pushing the legal limits of the definition of "service" dogs. Restaurants, apartment houses, and other businesses may now be legally required to allow dogs who help not only those with physical disabilities, but also provide "emotional" support. Not only is the definition of "support" expanding, but so, apparently, is the definition of "support animal"--from what has usually been considered a dog to other types of animals including trained primates. Gone are the days of the organ grinder's accordion and companion monkey's tiny cymbals, an apparently politically incorrect stereotype offensive to the Primate-Americans among us, replaced by the primates who have been trained to provide emotional and in some cases--like the diabetic woman who trained her primate to retrieve her insulin and needles--even medical support.

But the expansion of the all animal/all the time policy seems to have hit a wall as decided by two recent cases involving a monkey on one side and a judge who thought he was the one being made a monkey of. Seems that as relatively loosey-goosey (no disrespect meant to the Avian-Americans among us) as the term "support animal" may be, legally a doctor must certify that a patient is keeping the pet for health reasons. Once you get your doctor's note, the New York Courts have ruled that emotional support is a valid reason to keep a pet even if the building has a no-pet policy. But when a Missouri woman tried to argue that her Bonnet Macaque monkey is trained to assist her with her agoraphobia and anxiety, the Judge ruled against her 'right' to take the monkey to Wal-Mart or to a cafeteria. The Judge found that the while the monkey, who is trained to fetch the remote control or her toothbrush, may have some pretty cool party tricks in his arsenal there is no correlation between his abilities and the owner's disability. An animal that "simply provides comfort" according to the Judge, is the equivalent of a household pet and does not qualify as a service animal. Even if he can play a mean set of cymbals.

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The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who introduced a structuralist and universalist approach to the study of anthropology has died, a month before he would have turned 101.

Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Belgium and grew up in France, in a French-Jewish family long involved in the arts. He began field work and teaching in the 1930s, primarily in Brazil. He was a visiting professor at the New School in New York in the 1940s and then returned to Paris, where he received his doctorate.

In 1955, Levi-Strauss published what many see as his most influential work, Tristes Tropiques. Levi-Strauss began the story of his anthropological work in Brazil and elsewhere by declaring: "I hate traveling and explorers." And indeed, many of his critics' largest problems with his structuralist approach to anthropology, which sought universal ideas in so-called primitive societies to show human commonalities, was that Levi-Strauss was not an explorer. He preferred study to fieldwork. Levi-Strauss searched for an underlying universal structure to humanity and believed that humans relied on opposites, such as cold vs. hot, to understand the world.

Tristes Tropiques was one man's look at humanity, his attempts and work to understand it. Much of anthropology has changed since the book was published 55 years ago and Levi-Strauss himself rejected the idea that he was the "father of structuralism". But regardless of labels, his influence on anthropology is undeniable and his works will continue to be read by those still trying to make sense of how people explain the world around them.