Paul St. Pierre, age 10, of Portland, Maine, for his question:

Why do laws let people sometimes kill deer?

Naturally nobody wants to wipe out our gentle deer. So it seems sensible to have laws that forbid people to kill them. In this case, you would expect the laws to work at all times, at every day of the year. Then we learn that the don't kill the deer laws work only sometimes. For a few weeks in the year there is a deer season. At this time a human hunter may go forth and kill one or perhaps two deer.

Actually there is a good reason behind this strange arrangement. The secret of happy survival is enough but not too many. This applies to the deer, who need a certain amount of greenery to survive. When there are too many deer in a region, some of them will starve. The balance of nature needs enough deer to survive to hand on life to the next generation. So most of the year we have laws to protect them. But we have a short deer season to make sure that they do not have a population explosion.