On 3/27/2016 8:23 PM, HVAC wrote:
> Back in the day it was thought that if you dragged a red herring
> behind you it would throw bloodhounds off your trail
>
According to a pair of articles by Professor Gerald Cohen and Robert
Scott Ross published in Comments on Etymology (2008), supported by
etymologist Michael Quinion and accepted by the Oxford English
Dictionary, the idiom did not originate from a hunting practice.[11]
Ross researched the origin of the story and found the earliest reference
to using herrings for training animals was in a tract on horsemanship
published in 1697 by Gerland Langbaine.[11]
Langbaine recommended a
method of training horses (not hounds) by dragging the carcass of a cat
or fox so that the horse would be accustomed to following the chaos of a
hunting party.[11]
He says if a dead animal is not available, a red
herring would do as a substitute.[11] This recommendation was
misunderstood by Nicholas Cox, published in the notes of another book
around the same time, who said it should be used to train hounds (not
horses).[11]
Either way, the herring was not used to distract the hounds
or horses from a trail, rather to guide them along it.[11]