SEATTLE—Urging parents to seek help from a mental health care provider if their child displays such behaviors, psychologists at the University of Washington warned Tuesday that adolescents who abuse animals often go on to become factory farm owners later in life. “When an adult owns a livestock production facility that abuses, kills, and dismembers animals on an industrial scale, it is frequently the case that, as a young person, they derived pleasure from torturing pets,” said developmental psychology professor Jane Gordon, explaining that most owners of U.S. factory farms—which routinely confine billions of chickens, cows, and pigs in cramped metal cages with no natural light, pumping them full of hormones and antibiotics until the day they are slaughtered—spent years of their youth developing the cruel, painful techniques they would master as adults. “When a person dedicates their life to locking up animals, starving them, tasing them, and forcing them to watch as their relatives have their throats slit? That behavior doesn’t come from nowhere. If you see a child emotionally abusing or deliberately causing pain to an animal, they may be well on their way to running a multinational meat-packing conglomerate.” Gordon added that while intervention can be difficult, the worst thing a parent can do is sit back and ignore the warning signs that their child may grow up to be the CEO of Tyson, Hormel, or Perdue.