Amid a surge of applications for Florida’s first bear hunt in a decade, the state is reducing the number of black bears that can be taken in the controversial December event.

State wildlife authorities this week cut the number of available bear tags by 15, to 172. Each tag, distributed through an application process that opened last Friday, entitles a hunter to kill one bear.

“That’s going in the right direction,” said Chuck O’Neal, president and founder of of Speak Up Wekiva, a Central Florida-based environmental group which opposes hunting the iconic and often reclusive bear, the state’s largest land mammal. “Better…but still too many.”

George Warthen, chief conservation officer for the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, told the Orlando Sentinel that the agency had rece

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