Finally, welfare scores for housing systems and hazards were expressed on a scale from 0 to 10.
Table 3 shows Kendall's coefficient of concordance (W) for the scores given to housing systems and hazards by background.
Kendall's coefficient of concordance among experts (n = 24) was highly significant (P < 0.001), but low (0.29 and 0.18 for housing systems and hazards respectively).
A semantic-modelling type questionnaire [ 15- 17] was sent to experts, requesting 'intuitive' welfare scores for housing systems and hazards on scales from 0 to 10.
As the respondents were familiar with the housing systems and hazards (as they were experts who had been asked to abstain from scoring when they were not familiar with it) and as they were asked to respond without much contemplation, it is reasonable to assume that in most cases the scores were given for typical, representative examples of systems and hazards.
Therefore, the scores reported here for the different types of housing systems and hazards cannot be taken to represent welfare scores for all individual cases, and further work is needed to address this point.
White veal in baby boxes and suckler calves at pasture were added as 'controls' to the list of housing systems, and insufficient roughage and insufficient play were added to the list of hazards in order to examine the hypothesis that these are important systems and hazards not adequately addressed in the EFSA report [ 8, 9] as indicated in Bracke et al. [ 10].
An important caveat with respect to the interpretation of housing-system (and hazard) scores, however, is that the scores were given for the experts' personal interpretation of welfare.
Otherwise, W values were low for both housing system and hazard scores (range 0.09 to 0.29, Table 3) compared to similar welfare scores for pregnant sows (W = 0.73 and 0.43 for housing systems and attributes respectively, [ 15]).
*In 2007, a "smart" landing craft outfitted with a precision guidance and navigation system and hazard-avoidance systems for improving the chances of landing in the right place and in one piece.
