How/Why is such a statement offensive?

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I knew a guy who got a lot of flak for posting "Dogs outnumber people in society."

I honestly can't see why that would be offensive. I'm pretty normal for an Aspie and I have got nothing logical.

He got flak for posting that here? What was the context?

Some people would be offended by someone possibly implying that dogs are part of 'society'. There are (at least!) two ways of reading the statement!

To all: Hi, thank you for all your replies. Um, this statement was originally posted on Facebook. I don't grasp the full story behind this statement, though you may wish to Google "Sun Xu" if you would like to have more details. If I remembered correctly, the guy posted this statement after remarking that he had encountered "ungracious old men" before. When he apologized for bumping into these "ungracious old men", they stared at him and muttered angrily instead of accepting his apologies.

As an Aspie, I'm very puzzled why so many netizens are angered by this statement that dogs outnumber people in society...

1. I myself have made various statements (online and offline) comparing humans to animals. Since I'm human too, I have no intention whatsoever to offend fellow humans. I merely want to highlight that we humans all have primitive (animal-like) traits lurking within our psyches. We can suppress these traits, but we can't pretend that these traits don't exist at all. Personally, I see myself, a homo sapien, as a member of the Hominidae family in the animal kingdom. I consider chimps and bonobos as my close cousins; gorillas and orang utans as my distant relatives. The only animal-related term that offends me is "b***h".
2. I assume that the only type of people who might be offended by this statement are the "ungracious old men" mentioned earlier. If the word "dogs" is meant as an insult, it is directed at those "ungracious old men", not directed at every member of society, so why are so many netizens offended?

I'm not American; but I assume that most of you here are Americans. I've heard that in the US, there is the First Amendment that protects the freedom of speech. If so, won't laws against hate speech violate the First Amendment?

I don't understand how anyone can find that offensive. Either there are more dogs than people which makes it true or or there are more people than dogs in which case you would tell them that it was not true.

Doing some quick searches on Google tells me that this is not true. As of June 2011 there are 311,591,917 people in the US. One site I looked at said that there are 78.2 million owned dogs in the US. I suppose that doesn't count every dog and doesn't count strays but I'd say that there are more people than dogs.

That may be different in other countries.

Edit: After looking stuff up on Google I can see why they were offended. He was referring to a group of people as dogs which is generally used to insult people. Out of context I just took it literally as a factual statement (although it wasn't true).

Reminds me of another quote.

"The more I know about people, the better I like my dog."
-- Mark Twain


I wasn't the least bit offended by the FB post.