Sharjah24 - AFP: At four in the morning outside a Yangon monastery, environmental team were wrestling 30 writhing pythons into old rice sacks and loading them into a van.
It was just another day in the life of Myanmar's premier snake removal squad, prising pythons and cajoling cobras from dangerous entanglements with the human world before returning them to their natural habitat.
Stuffed into the sacks were three months' worth of work, rescued from homes and apartments around Yangon and cared for at the monastery until they are fit for release to the wild.
"I love snakes because they are not deceitful," Shwe Lei said at the snake shelter run by the group, a python entwined around her body.
"If you acknowledge their nature, they are lovely."
Her mentor Ko Toe Aung, a burly 40-year-old who said he has been hospitalised seven times since he started catching snakes in 2016, was more prosaic.
Anyone in the snake-catching game has to be "fast and agile", he said.
"Wherever we catch a venomous snake, it is 90/10... It's a 90 percent chance the snake will bite me."
Their team -- called Shwe Metta, or "Golden Love" in Burmese -- has around a dozen members and rescued around 200 snakes last year from around Yangon.
Social media videos of the pair pulling snakes out of sink plugholes and extricating them from roof eaves have earned them the moniker "prince and princess of snakes" from local media.
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