deerassociation.com
They moved away from being a trophy hunting group, or at least proceeded as one with the QDMA name. Studies had shown it was more looked at by most hunters as big money old white guys killing booners and not the guy that has 5 or 10 acres and is happy to kill a 2 y/o basket 8. They kept the logo when they merge with the National Deer Alliance about the time of COVID. It's 2 groups working as 1 to make it more about introducing new hunters and not be 100% about big bucks. Ask BSK said, they have changed over about 1/2 of the staff, sold the big QDMA building and the few hundreds of acres they had in GA. Everyone works from home. It was a large savings to the group by not having this building and land.
Exactly why I lost interest in them and stopped working with them.
Had no idea about this. Honestly, I think they're in deep trouble as an organization.
I joined the QDMA way back in 1995, when they only had about 5,000 members. It eventually grew to 60,000+ members. I wrote for their magazine. I donated my time to give many, many presentations at QDMA meetings/banquets. They were an organization that promoted the passing of yearling and some 2 1/2 year-old bucks to advance the buck age structure, as well as the adequate harvest of does to control population density. Anyone can do that on their hunting property. They also provided good info on fairly simple habitat management techniques. Then all of sudden they began talking about passing up all bucks below maturity. Then they started talking about waiting until bucks are 5 1/2. Habitat management advice became geared to the big, BIG landowners. In my opinion, the big change occurred when they replaced the Board of Directors - that was originally made up of wildlife biologists - with owners of big hunting equipment companies. Once trophy hunter money became the focus of the organization (my opinion), I no longer had an interest in the organization. Hunters left the organization in droves.
What year was that?
2018? 17? 16? I dont remember now.
This was based on surveys done of the hunting community about what their perceptions of the QDMA was. I'm sure those at the banquets weren't like that. But those outside looking in did see that.
I joined as a reg member in '96 or '97, then became a life member 1999. I agree, the focus changed to bringing money in and being a big organization, like NWTF did. They forgot what their goals and objectives were when they started and it caused a lot of failure with the group. I think the new NDA setup is working ok but will never be what it was 15 years ago.
