A Red Herring Mystery Cache
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Believe it or not, red herring has as much to do with hunting dogs as with brightly colored fish. Here's how:
A herring is a soft-finned bony fish, people who like to eat herring have long preserved them by salting and slowly smoking them.
That process makes a herring turn red or dark brown and gives them a very strong smell.
Dogs love to snif f such smelly treats, a fact that makes the fish a perfect diversion for anyone trying to distract hunting dogs from the trail of their quarry.
The pract ice of using pre served fish to confuse so many of the hunting dogs led to the use of the term "red herring" for anything that diverts attention from the issue at hand.
"You have to look beyond the obvious" it was once said, and in 1807, William Cobbett wrote how he used kipper (a strong-smelling smoked fish) to lay a false trail, while training hunting dogs an apocryphal story that was probabl y the origin of the idiom.
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