its kind of a weird question. because, in the abstract, people often view children as "innocent", see them as cute and lovable, in many ways this is precisely because they have no autonomy to act on their own that they are seen this way. theres a whole cultural meme of "think of the children" as to how this emotively and rhetorically gets used. and so, in some purely emotive sense, i can see as to why you would say this. but yet… children are objectively oppressed. maybe less likely to be killed in some circumstances, but otherwise more than adults. they are quasi-property. and this whole cute and innocent thing can act as cover or motive for that as often as anyone actually helping children for real.

also, you could say something like, white people care more about black children than black adults, housed people care more about homeless children than homeless adults, global north people care more about global south children than global south adults, men care more about girls than women, etc. there is nonzero point here, its not hard to observe how children are used in ie charity ads, ive seen plenty of youtube ads for aid to gaza that focus in on children, etc. and this really does represent in some way an offense against the adults in this situation, it erases agency, it is occasionally even turned against them and against the children in child services type stuff, and frankly, doesnt really end up amounting to children in these situations actually getting much

and of course, some adults (including wealthy, powerful, and privileged adults) have children in their circle of family and immediate friends, who in a sense they care about more than strangers, but also oppress and abuse, and if you here them talk about "their" children relative to the world you are likely to here some mix of sincere companionship and desire for their wellbeing on those grounds, and domineering abuse. and like… well, one can very much say, people should care less about "their own" children, their families and friends, and more about the world as a whole, especially when wealthy and powerful. im not sure this is wrong, its not a crazy thing to say, but i think if you are gonna say it you should recognize it as a fairly radical ethical philosophy that goes well beyond the conventionally political

so, overall, id say that original statement has some element of truth to it purely emotionally but… it seems hard to take it too much at face value. cause children are not exactly getting much out of it, they are still oppressed --- most humans are speciesists. they do not, fundamentally, view nonhuman animals as moral "people" (there is no real good term here tbh, "patient" seems too one sided, "people" will have you split hairs at about some narrower meaning of capabilities). this is a dominant ideology of every human society.

sometimes, humans do something similar to the view of childhood "innocence" and lack of autonomy on nonhuman animals. sometimes, they make unprincipled exceptions to their speciesism for nonhuman animals that are seen culturally as "companion" animals. sometimes they make unprincipled exceptions for nonhuman animals that are part of their family or friend group (and simultaneously, their property) --- on tumblr, a lot of people are invested (at least nominally) in liberatory politics and philosophy but stop at speciesism. often, they see people doing the above things. or, more rarely, they see an animal liberationist sincerely trying to move towards treating nonhuman animals more like "moral people", but they dont really distinguish these. for whatever reason, probably a quirk of demographics, a lot of people on tumblr are way less likely to "like dogs" or "like animals", and so less inclined to make unprincipled exceptions. but they see people not as invested in human liberation as themselves, who either emotively like dogs/animals, or who have dogs as family members and rhetorically describe them as such, etc. they might occasionally observe people being emotively seemingly more interested in dogs in warzones, homeless dogs, etc. than the humans in that situation. and from this, they often like to say, that many people, often privileged people, care more about nonhuman animals than they do humans. which, being speciesists as most humans are, they then also see as a kind of species treason on top of the interhuman oppression.

and, well, this seems a lot like the children thing. i kind of want to just say, i can kind of see what you mean emotively, but it seems dubious at best to describe this as actually caring for them so much, or materially amounting to much, because nonhuman animals are oppressed, they are property --- that would be kind of true. but its actually worse than that i think. children are oppressed, but they generally have *some* kind of protection. most people do not think its fine to just kill children for profit, convenience, etc. of course of killing children happens, by cops and armies and parents, but there is something. and chiildren are slaves, property, but they usually have *some* recognized right to resources and have considerable resources dedicated to their at least physical wellbeing as a portion of that towards adults. the situation with companion animals is *much* worse. they are largely treated as fairly disposable, in practice. they are regularly culled en masse to control the population. they are fully property, not just mostly property. they are killed in medical experiments they are bred for in factory farms. to say children have it better off than adults is false but there are isolated cases where i can see it, to say humans have it worse than dogs outside the most extreme cases of active genocide (ok tbf maybe a situation like gaza in particular gets into this level) is... absolutely absurd. (and i... dont think i need to elaborate here on how nonhuman animals that do not have the cultural "companion" status are treated. if you really need that you should uh, go watch dominion or something, sorry. i once saw someone on here get mad because someone added "and animals" on to a post about people not caring enough about humans. and they said people already cared about animals enough. which. absurdity!) so i think the end product of this, the constant reference to caring more about dogs or animals, that anyone is treating dogs better than humans in a way that matters at scale, its... absurd ---