Problem
You are a graduate student in behavioral pharmacology and your lab is conducting a drug discrimination study, an operant procedure in which rats are trained to identify drugs with stimulus properties similar to those of a training drug. The primary goal of the present study is to test several experimental compounds for their similarity to clozapine, an important treatment for schizophrenia. The compounds to be tested have been sent to your advisor as part of a contract awarded from a drug company. The generalization testing portion of the study is nearing completion, with only one dose-response curve left to obtain. During routine feeding, you notice that 8 of the 10 animals in the study have developed tumor-like growths at the site of injection on the stomach. Additionally, these animals have begun losing weight. Finally, you note that the animals do not exhibit any behaviors suggesting that they are experiencing discomfort. Concerned, you mention the growths and weight loss to your advisor, who instructs you to continue with generalizations testing. He is concerned that having to train a new set of animals in order to test one drug would waste large amounts of research time and resources and may cause problems in interpreting the results. He further states that the animals will be euthanized as soon as the testing phase of the study is completed in less than a month and the animals will be fine until then. Is your advisor's suggested course of action legally and ethically appropriate? What are your obligations in this situation?