Off The Hook Exotic Pets Is the Place for Moon’s Unusual Animal Lovers
By Chris Mueller, Moon News Cloud Contributor
Tucker and Leo are two 5-week old rabbits recently purchased from Off the Hook Exotic Pets, located in Coraopolis.
Brian Wilwol, 20, recently purchased the pair of bunnies, and is extremely happy with his decision.
“They were just so cute inside the cage when I visited,” he said. “It was a no-brainer. They make the perfect low-maintenance house pet.”
“I’ve probably sold over three dozen rabbits since November,” said co-owner Desiree Diaz. “We don’t hold our animals for very long.”
The two baby bunnies are examples of the exotic pets on display at Off the Hook, a family-run business that started up last November. Diaz and her huband have a passion for animals and making sure they find the proper home.
Success wasn’t that easy to come by.
“We were a traveling pet store for a while,” Desiree said. “We do fish tank design and maintenance for a lot of residential clients. Once we picked up more and more clients, we ended up with 34 on a weekly basis. They needed fish, and we just decided it was time to branch out and expand.”
Off the Hook features hundreds of different types of wildlife, expanding as far as crocodiles and pythons, to parrots and rabbits.
“The most popular is probably the reptiles,” she said. ”They make awesome pets. They don’t require a lot of training and are really low maintenance. It’s much easier to have a pet that you can handle when you want to, but don’t necessarily have to.
Keeping a solid foundation between buyer and breeder, Off the Hook makes sure all the proper precautions are taken in order to ensure complete safety and health of the animal.
“We do try to make sure we’re on a personal relationship with most of our breeders,” said Diaz. “That way, we’re able to pass more information on to the buyer.”
Off the Hook houses reptiles, amphibians, and rodents right now. But according to Diaz, one day they hope to expand to much more than that.
“We always are on the lookout for locally bred dogs and cats,” she said. “My thing is, I don’t want to overpopulate the area with pitbulls and things that are generally in the shelters.”
Off the Hook Exotic pets is a new and up and coming business that all animal lovers with enjoy. To learn more, visit its Facebook page or website, which is www.georgethefishguy.com.
Chris is a junior Communications major at RMU with an applied concentration in journalism. He is Sports Editor for RMU Sentry Media. As current Sports...
Jamie • Apr 21, 2015 at 11:39 am
I am changing my previous review from 5 stars to 1. They gave me good deals in setting up my first saltwater tank but they neglected in inform me of a lot of NEED TO KNOW things about the corals and fish they were selling me. Off the Hook Exotic Pets set my tank up for failure. They sold me a fish that ate about $300 worth of coral and did nothing about it besides give me a soft coral worth $40. I told them a lot of things were going wrong in my tank and they did not put forth any effort to help. After spending $2000 in their store and being loyal to their store only and buying everything from them, they were not loyal to me.
I got Oddball Pets and another privately owned company to come in and look at my tanks. They informed me of a lot of things Off the Hook Exotic Pets did wrong. As this was my first saltwater tank i did not know i was supposed to be feeding the corals, removing chlorine from the water, and they sold me a filter that is only good for 20-30 gallons when my tank is 55 gal. All George kept saying was that he was an “expert” and knew what he was doing, but all he was doing was taking advantage of someone who works for a small non-profit who wanted to set up the tanks to educate the kids in the house about saltwater life.
They have great reviews so they may be a good store, just keep an eye on your wallet and research everything they tell you to do for saltwater before you make a decision. I am still waiting to see if Off the Hook Exotic Pets is going to do anything about how they screwed me over.