aespa’s Winter (윈터) sparked anger among Korean netizens this past week for allegedly mistreating and torturing animals.
Several days after the rookie idol was accused of “abusing” a cat, and later her pet hamsters, Winter’s past statement about taking care of her group’s pet lizard has begun making rounds on the web in the wake of the recent controversies.
Winter (real name Kim Min Jeong) previously had dropped a message on the community service app Bubble. As shared by the “Next Level” singer, her fellow member Ningning adopted a pet lizard name Poopy. Furthermore, she revealed that the lizard smelled so bad on that day that she “almost gave up on raising” the reptile.
While netizens didn’t pay much attention to the comment at the time, many are now seeing it in a far more different light. The news of her abusing animals did not sit well with the public. Many people remarked that even if she intended her statement as a joke, it only made her looked worse due to her ongoing controversy.
Well, this isn’t the first time the 20-year-old public figure became embroiled in such a controversy! Earlier this week, Winter received tons of backlash from the public after she opened up about her experience with her pet hamsters on aespa’s official Bubble account.
The “Black Mamba” vocalist shared, “I owned 25 hamsters when I was in middle school. I definitely started with just two, but they ‘got along really well’. She then continued by saying, “When they’re newly born, they’re really cute. Like babies. Then I decided to only raise one of them who was kind of sick, so I only raised one.”
Winter’s story about raising her pet hamsters caused quite a stir online, as several netizens started calling her out for (again) abusing the animals. As pointed out by the commentators, each hamster should be placed in separate cages. However, Winter’s negligent in housing her first two hamsters in the same cage, which caused them to reproduce.
Here are some of the highlighted comments shared by netizens:
- “Where did she put the other 24 hamsters.”
- “She thinks of animals lightly.”
- “She didn’t look up any information before getting them.”
- “You should get familiar with the basics first before raising a hamster.”
Then again, a few other fans argued that Winter might have be too young at the time. To quote one netizen, “She was a child! How would a child know the basics about taking care of a pet hamster?”
