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FOR the price of a cup of coffee and a newspaper, you can lay a landmine, no
skills required. Apart from bullets, mines are the cheapest weapons around. But
these dragon’s teeth endure long after the original conflict ends. The clear-up
costs hundreds of thousands of times more than that cup of coffee. In spite of
technological advances, it generally boils down to people and dogs risking their
lives. In The Devil’s Garden (Pimlico, £12.50), Lydia Monin and
Andrew Gallimore say that poodles are the best dogs for sniffing out mines, but
“some former military men find poodles a little embarrassing, and prefer a more…