Expert consultation on weighting factors of criteria for assessing environmental enrichment materials for pigs

EC directive 2001/93/EC states that pigs must have permanent access to a sufficient quantity of material to enable proper investigation and manipulation activities. This directive requires further interpretation. In order to facilitate the further implementation of the directive into national, Dutch legislation a preliminary model was constructed to assess the value of different enrichment materials for pigs. Using an e-mail questionnaire expert opinion was elicited in order to ‘validate’ the preliminary model. In total 8 senior pig welfare experts assessed 33 assessment criteria ordered according to the conceptual framework underlying the preliminary model. Kendall's coefficient of concordance of the experts without missing values (n=6) was 0.41 (P