His expertise with dogs was publicized primarily by word of mouth, and Millan soon developed a clientele that included entertainment-industry professionals. Millan's first mention in the national mainstream media came in People magazine in December 2002 in an article describing his work with action-film director Ridley Scott's Jack Russell Terriers. Millan is a self-taught dog trainer who established a reputation for working with aggressive breeds and hard-to-handle cases at a San Diego dog groomers, subsequently developing a celebrity clientele. In 2002, after he was profiled in a newspaper article, Millan received offers from a number of producers and chose to work with Sheila Emery and Kay Sumner. They teamed with MPH Entertainment, Inc., which had been involved in successful reality-based cable shows, to produce a pilot. The producers had preliminary talks with Animal Planet, but the network would not commit beyond a single pilot episode. The National Geographic Channel expressed interest in the program, ordering 26 half-hour episodes on the proviso that MPH provide the required deficit financing. Under this agreement MPH and Emery/Sumner retained the copyright to the show. The channel retains control of television distribution in the United States and Canada. MPH and Emery/Sumner control worldwide home video and foreign sales and share that revenue with the channel, allowing them to create and market various video collections. The name of the program was similar to Paul Owens's 1999 book The Dog Whisperer. Owens, a reward-based trainer, has distanced himself from the program and now calls himself "the original dog whisperer". The show premiered in 2004, gradually gaining audience attention by word of mouth. For the first season, the series wasn't positioned in prime time, and the channel did little to promote the show. However, in Season 2 it was expanded to an hour and moved to a prime time slot. In 2009 the National Geographic Channel agreed with Fox to syndicate the series in the fall of 2010, bringing it to a channel with exposure to approximately 50 million of the USA's 120 million households. A journalist for The Times questioned Cesar Millan on his motivation for producing the program, and quoted him as responding, "The goal that God and I have together is the whole world transformed through a dog." In 2006, former publicist Makeda Smith filed a copyright infringement suit which stated that, in 2001, she and her partner branded Millan as "The Dog Whisperer" by