Southern Stiletto Snake - Little Devil

The Southern Stiletto Snake (Atractaspis bibroni) I call it the little devil of snake. It looks harmless but it is responsible for many bites - very painful bite. Many amateur snake catchers are bitten by this snake.
It lives underground and I have found them in termite mounds and under rocks.
When I first started catching snakes as a young boy in Bulawayo Zimbabwe, I'm glad I took the time to study about snakes first, because we came across this snake quite often and I knew there was no safe way to handle this snake.
Usually we would pin snakes down with a stick behind the snakes head and then pick it up from behind the head with our fingers. This method is fine for most other snakes but not this snake!
It has huge fangs and it can stab any fingers holding it behind it's head.
The venom causes much pain and until recently it had not caused a fatality in humans. Recently there was a case of a small person being bitten repeatedly by a Southern Stiletto Snake he had laid down on and he actually died.
Once I was doing a Snake Show in Pretoria and a man came to speak to me afterwards. When he was young he had caught one of these snakes, it bit him on the one finger and it was sore, so he swapped hands and it bit him on another finger on the other hand!
As a result, he lost the tips of two of his fingers, one on each hand.

My method to catch this snake, which has a nasty attitude and flicks itself around trying to bite you, is to pin it with a stick - DO NOT TRY PICK IT UP BEHIND THE HEAD - I pick it up by it's tail and then as I lift it into the air I keep the snakes first third of the body hanging over the stick so that it cannot flick up or to the sides to get a bite. I then put it quickly into a container.