An interesting demining approach is to buy the local villagers lots of sheep and pen them in the areas of concern. Once in a while a sheep goes boom. Meanwhile: wool and baby sheep as a side effect.
Sheep are scared stomachs on legs. When they see their daily source of food and nothing suspicious (such as a stranger), they reach. My grandfather could also call them and they would reach even with a stranger present.
Similarly, training locals in demining with donated basic equipment is also good, in the sense that these new experts can sell their services locally. The down side is that these brave people take extra risk.
Both the livestock and local training methods were used in Bosnia, which had a serious landmine problem recently.
That might kill sheep outright, but I doubt it.
Also, it suffers from the same problem as the Mine Kafon, in that it's a more-or-less random walk and you won't know whether the whole area is cleared.
Just to be clear, are you saying that it is only very slightly better for a sheep, rather than a human child, to be maimed by a land mine? That seems to be what you wrote, but I'm having a very difficult time reconciling your world view with my own, so I'm hoping that I am somehow misunderstanding.
And given that, what does it say about you as a person that you'd think that it was a good idea?
This might be an uncomfortable world view, taking how much we depend on non-human abuse in our civilization, but it's not the only case where we built it on abuse of others, human or not.
This makes sense for the people who live there- the dessert is not an easy place to grow crops and a multi-purpose animal is very valuable for survival purposes. Animal rights is a tough sell in a place like this.
It seems like an ineffective non-systematic way to de-mine that damages animals that the Afghans value though.
Animal lives and welfare do matter, but when it comes to weighing human lives against animal lives, only a ratio of something like a million-to-one may be ethically justified. Definitely not one-to-one sheep to a kid. Definitely not even hundred-to-one. It could be reasonable to sacrifice a few humans to spare a species from extinction, but not to save some individual animals, however sentient they may be.
My fellow humans are important. Leaving a kid to die to spare a hundred sheep is disgraceful.
Now, as a mental exercise, I suggest you replace "animal" with a racial slur of choice. Because, seriously, 100 years ago people said that about all kinds of other people. They actually still do. Having a slightly higher amount of common DNA is not a justification of whatever-the-hell.
And at the point where you say "however sentient they may be", you just go into downright I-don't-want-to-meet-that-person-in-a-dark-alley territory.
But, coming back to the original issue - it all comes down to two different theories of ethics, opinions about what is good and just: in essence, if some choice equals to murdering one to save ten others [a simplification for the sake of argument, assume that no alternatives exist] , would doing so be good or evil?
There are valid arguments to say that doing so would be evil by the nature of the act.
There are valid arguments to say that not doing so would be evil, by the result of the act (10 others dying instead of 1).
And I do value a human life of "a racial slur of choice" more than a hundred sheep - archaic laws did value human lives in a couple dozen of domestic animals, and that whas when a peasant's life was considered cheap; we can and should be better than that.
And I do value my kids life more than your life - that is also quite natural, I doubt that you'd find any parents who think otherwise.
It all adds up. I mean, if you start discussing life and death, then most solutions aren't pretty; and discussing only 'pure' solutions means not saving (= murdering) lives - such as the lives of people that could have been saved by some sheep.
How about we don't murder any sheep or children, and instead spend the money that we would've spent on sheep torture on better fences, signs, education and mine clearance? While you're at it, you can lobby your elected representative to spend more than the currently pitiful amount that they do on mine clearance.
ps. A million-to-one? You have a very interesting idea of "ethics". Also of "definitely".