The animals are tame, but her stories are wild. In her new book “Pets and the City: True Tales of a Manhattan House Call Veterinarian,” animal doctor Amy Attas dishes on what she’s learned about the lives of New York’s wealthy and well-known by visiting their homes to care for their four-legged family members. Attas launched her mobile practice, City Pets , in 1992.
Joan Rivers, whom she had impressed with her no-nonsense approach to treating the comedian’s Yorkie, Spike, at Park East Animal Hospital, was her first client. Other notables, including Billy Joel, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Wayne Gretzky, Erica Jong and Steve Martin, followed. One night in the early 2000s, the vet got a call from Cher — Rivers had recommended her — who was on a plane from Italy with a stray dog she’d adopted there, named Pippo.
Attas diagnosed him with mange, gave him with an injection and warned that the dog’s skin condition was very contagious. Cher was aghast. “Well, that explains it.
Does the rash on humans look like this?” the superstar exclaimed as she flung open her robe to show, Attas writes, “her iconic body in its naked entirety.” Other clients revealed themselves to Attas in different ways. Twice a week, she would give a cat named Sophie a medicated bath, sometimes letting herself into the multi-million dollar apartment on East End Avenue where the pet lived.
One day, when she went to retrieve Sophie from the cat’s favorite hiding place under a bed, she fou.