ANIMAL protection activist Frankie Seymour has been selected as the Animal Justice Party’s candidate to contest the Monaro by-election next month.

Ms Seymour, a Queanbeyan resident, is passionate about stopping cruelty to animals and improving the wellbeing of domestic, farm and native animals.

“The animals and the compassionate people of Monaro have been abandoned by the major parties,” Ms Seymour said.

“In the middle of a long and terrible drought, when kangaroos were probably at their lowest numbers since European settlement, the NSW government authorised their open slather slaughter across NSW.”

An arts and environmental studies graduate, Ms Seymour has more than 30 years’ experience in social and environmental policy in the Australian Public Service.

If elected on February 12, she says she will fight for the repeal of the Biodiversity Conservation Act, and replace it with legislation that protects native animals from harm.

“Such legislation also needs to recognise the links between animal agriculture, deforestation and climate change, and the well-demonstrated relationship between animal/wildlife abuse and the last half dozen pandemics that have troubled the human world,” Ms Seymour said.

“Environmental science has shown me that neither humans nor other animals can continue to survive on this planet unless we humans stop destroying our ecosystems and wrecking our climate.”

Ms Seymour ran as a candidate for the Animal Justice Party for the seat of Eden-Monaro at the 2016 federal election.