Questions to be addressed

The primary question is what can be done to remedy the situation? Secondly, based on data collected so far, can one determine the likely outcome in completing the experiment?

Two alternative suggestions put to the researcher by the biometrician were:

Option 3. Continue the experiment but exclude diet A+B altogether and assign the 12 goats equally to diets C and B to ensure better replication for these two groups. This would mean that objective 1 was dropped.

Option 4. Stay with the altered treatment design and include four goats fed C, B and A+B. This would result in 10 goats in each of these groups as originally planned. It would retain objective 2 but mean that objective 1 would be interpreted somewhat differently. The researcher explained that this would be a desired option since the treatment A+B did not make any sense biologically. Nevertheless, we retain this option for illustration purposes.