This comes from the practice of dragging real red herring (very smelly fish) across the trail of a fox to lure your hounds off of the scent. A hunt saboteur might resort to something like this, but since the hounds are trained using this method, it probably wouldn't work. I think Tim Curry said it best when he said, "No, no.. communism was just a red herring" at the end of Clue.