The internet can’t get enough of Trash Dove

If you’re a regular Facebook user you’re bound to have come across the distressed looking purple bird that’s been popping up on everyone’s timeline in the past few days. What is it? Where did it come from? But most importantly, when will it go away?

Let us introduce Trash Dove, a Facebook messenger sticker set that was developed by American artist Syd Weiler. The stickers gained recent popularity thanks to the Asian market who released a video showing the dove in a dance-off with a cartoon cat (there had to be a cat included somewhere). Since then, the video has gained a whopping 4 million views alongside a throng of militant Trash Dove fans. Facebook users have been quick to jump on board this new trend, with the incredibly authoritative meme experts over at Know Your Meme being the first ones to trace back the bird’s origins.

Particularly popular is the sticker GIF, featured in the video, which depicts the bird headbanging back and forth back and forth back and forth….you get the gist. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the bird appeared in the comments section of Facebook pages worldwide including The Guardian, The Verge and Business Insider. One New York Times post even sees the Trash Dove GIF appear 92 times in a row, albeit all by the same person who clearly has a lot of time on his hands.

Trash Bird’s number one hobby seems to be his excessive carb consumption, with many of the stickers in the set showing him eating bread rolls, slices of bread, donuts, pizza and even one where he poses alongside a baguette which we can only assume will be eaten in due course. Was Trash Dove appropriately named because he gets all of these snacks from the garbage? Again, we can only continue to wonder.

Funny, right? Not for some. Not everyone on the WWW is a fan of Trash Dove and there is a petition to ban the bird from not only the social network but the entire internet. The petition only needs 2000 signatures, so if you’re one of these people who wants to shut Trash Dove down, you can go ahead and sign it here.