Da Mao, a giant panda at the Toronto Zoo, faced off against a snowman that his zookeepers constructed for his ‘enrichment’ in a widely viewed video

The year 2016 took Prince, David Bowie, Professor Snape and most of our sanity. But it has given us this video of a giant panda trying and failing to kill a snowman.

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Da Mao, a giant panda at the Toronto Zoo, faced off against a curiously bi-global snowman that his zookeepers constructed for his “enrichment”, in a video viewed more than half a million times.



After initially clawing at the snowman’s torso, the panda mounted the frozen structure and perched triumphantly on its head, before promptly losing his balance, falling, and being conked in the face by the snowman’s head as it fell to the ground.

The giant herbivorous mammal made several subsequent attempts to scale the decapitated snowman, but repeatedly tumbled, displaying both perseverance and flexibility as he somersaulted on to the snow-covered ground.

Da Mao is one of a pair of pandas that arrived in Toronto (via FedEx) from China as part of a conservation breeding program. Two panda cubs, Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue, were born to Da Mao and Er Shun in October 2015.

Though Da Mao’s showdown with the snowman may have ended in frustration, the panda will probably have the last laugh.

The panda, you see, is all of us, and the snowman is the year 2016. We keep trying to make the best of things, and we keep getting bopped on the head by wreckage. But we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, remembering that climate change is on our side in this one, terrible metaphor: rain is forecast for Toronto in the coming days.