Blaming the Victim?

San Diego Police now say that three men who were attacked by Tatiana the Tiger were drinking, smoking pot and taunting the tiger before she jumped out of the enclosure. I am in no way excusing what these three did. It was stupid and sometimes people who do stupid things meet sticky ends. Paul Dhaliwal told Carlos Sousa's father that he stood on the three foot rail and yelled at the tiger. The police found shoe prints on the rail that matched Dhaliwal's shoe. How stupid can you be? The victims (IMHO) definitely bear some culpability in the instance because it's a fairly safe bet that if they didn't aggravate the tiger, the tiger wouldn't have jumped out of the enclosure. However, if the wall separating the tiger from the public had been up to standards, Tatiana wouldn't have been able to get out, regardless of how badly she was taunted. The victims are planning to sue the SD Zoo, but I hope it gets thrown out. When I took Intro to Law (when I thought I wanted to be a paralegal), my professor talked about a concept called "contributory negligence," where someone else may have bore some responsibility in an accident, but if the victim contributed to the circustances, they were held just as liable. I think this is a good example of that.