At four in the morning outside the Yangon monastery, Shwe Lei and his team are stuffing 30 crawling 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, who rescue pythons and cobras from dangerous entanglements with the human world before releasing them back into their natural habitat. Three months’ worth of work were stuffed into sacks, rescued from houses and apartments around Yangon and cared for at the monastery until they were fit enough to be released into the wild.
“I love snakes because they are not deceitful,” Shwe Lei told AFP at a snake shelter run by the group.
“If you accept their nature, they are lovely.”
His mentor Ko Toe Aung, who is in his 40s, said he has been hospitalized seven times since catching the snake in 2016 had he been more professional.
He said that one has to be ‘sharp and agile’ in the game of catching snakes.
“Wherever we catch a venomous snake, it’s 90/10… there’s a 90 percent chance that the snake will bite me.”
His team — called Shwe Meta, or “Golden Love” in Burmese — has about a dozen members and last year rescued about 200 snakes from around Yangon.
Social media videos of the pair pulling snakes out of sink plugholes and off roof ledges earned them the nickname “prince and princess of snakes” from local media.
on the scent
The team have day-jobs and rely on donations for everything from their protective gear to the gasoline to drive their purple snake “ambulance”.
They mostly catch Burmese pythons – non-venomous snakes that are typically around five meters (16 ft) long and prey on rats and other small mammals that bite to death.
Cobras and banded kraits also make home in Yangon’s apartments and are an intriguing prospect – their venom can be fatal.
According to the latest available figures from the World Health Organisation, more than 15,000 people were bitten by snakes in Myanmar in 2014.
1,250 of them died, a death rate higher than in many other countries, mainly due to Myanmar’s creaking health system and lack of access to antivenom.
It is a danger that is never far from team work.
In March, he spent two days trying to remove several cobras from a nest under a house in Yangon.
Tunneling into the foundation, as neighbors observed, their digging was often interrupted by snakes spitting venom at them.
“It stinks,” said 31-year-old Ko Ye Min, a tattooed member of the team, taking a break from trying to reach the nest.
According to Ko Toe Aung, recognizing what kind of stink is another skill a snake catcher must adopt.
“We have to get familiar with the snakes before they can be removed… to identify the species of snakes,” he said.
The cobra, he said, smells “rotten”.
“But the python’s smell is very strong. Sometimes when we bring it in the ambulance, we even vomit.”
compassion
Through their online videos and growing fame, the Shwe Metta team hopes to encourage people to be more compassionate towards crawling reptiles – especially if one comes into their home.
Shwe Lei said, “In the past people…used to kill snakes when they found them.”
“But they have more knowledge and they know we can release the snakes back into the wild. So they tell us to catch them and remove them.”
The rescued snakes are kept under observation at a nearby monastery until there are sufficient numbers of them to justify traveling into the bush to release them.
In late March, the team went on such a trip into the hot forest of the Bago Yoma hills, 150 kilometers (90 mi) north of Yangon.
Each member carried a dragon in a bag over their shoulder until they reached a suitable place to release it.
Some of the stunned reptiles needed a gentle whip to let go, but after weeks in a cage and five-hour car journeys, Shwe Lei relented.
“No one likes the feeling of closure,” she said after slipping away for the last time – hopefully not returning to the human world for a long time.
“I’m happy to release the snakes … In terms of compassion for each other, it’s satisfying.”
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)