A false scent or false trail is an incorrect scent which may mislead an animal which hunts by smell

Smell

Smell may refer to:* Olfaction, sense of smell, the ability of humans and other animals to perceive odors* Odor, the percept resultant from the sense of smell...

, especially a hound

Scent hound

Scent hounds are a type of hound that primarily hunts by scent rather than sight. The Scenthound breeds are generally regarded as having some of the most sensitive noses among canines....

. This may be the result of deliberate interference by a hunt saboteur

Hunt saboteur

Hunt sabotage is the direct action that animal rights or animal welfare activists undertake to interfere with hunting activity.Anti-hunting campaigners are divided into those who believe in direct intervention and those who watch the hunt to monitor for cruelty and report violations of animal...

 or it may be a form of control by the master. Aniseed, a red herring

Red herring

A red herring is a deliberate attempt to divert attention.Red herring may refer to:* Red herring , the informal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question....

 or the entrails of a rabbit

Rabbit

Rabbits are small mammals in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha, found in several parts of the world...

 are commonly used for this purpose.

Metaphorical usage

In the first and second
editions of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage Fowler

Henry Watson Fowler

Henry Watson Fowler was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer and commentator on the usage of the English language...

uses the heading false scent to explain writing that causes the reader to second-guess: because the writer knows what is coming ahead, he may forget that his reader doesn't, and unwittingly "lay false scent" by writing something ambiguous that can only be disambiguated later in the text. The reader, once he realises he has been distracted, must go back and rescan the sentence or paragraph to understand the writer's intended meaning.

Examples

• When compiling a dictionary from postal contributions, we sort the letters in order to be able to refer to them later.

Various ambiguities – that "letters" may be taken to be those of the alphabet, and so "order" to mean alphabetical order – may lay false scent that is not detected until the reader reaches "refer", if even then.