Gray Rat Snakes can show a lot of color variation. Their background color can range from a very washed out shade of gray to a dark gray. There are also those animals that are not gray at all but have a background color ranging from a very light tan to a dark brown. The saddles also have a similar range of color. You also have the Gulf Hammock gray rats that show both saddles and stripes. If you get a young one and get it used to being picked up and held, most become calm and are easy to keep.

Check your game laws. In Virginia, they adopted the new naming convention of calling Black Rats, Pantherophis alleghaniensis. This puts Eastern Black, Yellow, and Everglades all in the same bag. It also means that Black Rats from your area are not the same thing as Black Rats from my part of the country. Since I don’t think Virginia is going to go around testing the mtDNA of anyone’s snakes, I find the new law absurd. It is meant to protect native animals from over collecting, but it also pretends that we can’t tell if a Yellow Rat was collected in Virginia, and we can tell what side of the Alleghenies a Black Rat came from.

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