15 years old is the absolute minimum that snake could have been. All I know is that it was wild caught as an adult in 1991. I have no way of knowing if it was 25 or 35 years old. I typically despise when people write off health problems of a reptile or amphibian to old age, because it is usually hardly the case. This one, however was pretty obvious to us all.

It was a black rat snake, don't know how the rattle got in there, stupid speech recognition software!
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...the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it."
Aldo Leopold (1938)

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Calvin and Hobbes (Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink', 1991)

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