Hmm, I sometimes think that assessing social workers try to put a bit of pressure on adopters to see how they react to people being rude to and about them as a way of seeing how they respond and might respomd to children and other professionals not taking them seriously and being rude to you.
To me it is an obviously spurious and ridiculous complaint if the dogs have already been assessed, but you should consider what your next response would be and how you think a social worker would want you to respond. You can't change whatever your initial response would be, but you can consider what you are going to do moving forward.
I assume that you won't just be assessed for this child, but that you would be approved as adopters for any child, and therefore your responses should cover things that are applicable to all children.
So, if you are worried about whether you are seen as flexible enough, you could consider being super responsive and 'recognising' the terrible, heinous, never-before seen in this world infraction of having dogs who like to jump on the sofa. Tell her that on reflection you realise that it might be tricky for a child placed with you, and you would consider rehoming the dogs if they weren't able to be trained appropriately for the needs of your child, or were incompatible with them. You will embark upon immediate de sofa training at once, and appreciate her comments highlighting that. You will bring in a crack team of dog trainers and work night and day to prevent such crimes against nature happen again.
Or, if you are worried you might be seen as too uptight, you could go down the route of being quite chilled and relaxed- we will deal with it as it comes, thanks for noting it, we have these support networks who can help with the dogs temporarily, have researched cultural differences in dog ownership so feel prepared to help a child acclimatise, so on and so forth.
Remember she may not personally like dogs, and object to them being on the sofa, particularly with guests. I know a lot of people, even dog owners) might be shocked that dogs would get on the sofa when guests were around (for example, my parents have owned dogs all our life, and have never allowed dogs on the sofa or in the living room, especially with guests. My mum sometimes sneaks the littlest on her lap when my dad is out, but they were very firm that dogs usually do not belong on furniture). So adoption training is also about recognising how your actions and family culture can be very alien to a small child (even if they have been living within it, you have to recognise that the training process needs to accommodate that.) I would also be aware that there has been lots of negative press about dog bites recently, which might make social workers wary.
In terms of the disrupted placements, I would expect these to be robustly questioned and probed into because it shows social workers where your boundaries are. For example, if you disrupted a teenager for continually absconding back to their family, or for bringing drugs into the family home, or requiring significant ongoing mental health support after many crises (just a few possible difficult situations as examples), social workers will want to know what mental, emotional and physical resources you would have available and what you would have done differently were this to be your own child. It isn't unlikely that the child currently placed with you has some of the same if not more significant risk factors for the same behaviours that led to the disruption and making your house as a placement unsuitable, but disrupting an adoption is more difficult than disrupting a foster placement for all parties. So they will need to strongly guard against this.
I say all of these things not because I doubt that you would make an excellent family for the child, but because not all foster care placements make the best adoptive placements for children, and you might have to shift your thinking to be broader and recognise that social workers will be comparing you to many, many other families. Adoption is competitive, and many children have several families interested adopting them, so the burden of proof is on the adoptive family to show that they are the most suitable out of many placements. I don't think that you should just accept whatever the social worker says, but also remember that they may be weighing up the emotional cost of disrupting a placement with you with potential benefits of a family that has more resources, a fresh start and extensive experience of whatever challenges your foster child may face both now and in the future, and act accordingly.
I say this not because I want to be offensive, but because resilience is the name of the game and if you are going through the process and have a particular child in mind who I assume you have quite the bond with, it can probably be hard to hold in mind that despite how you feel, for a social worker they will be not seeing you as a family unit to disrupt, but as a temporary placement until the most appropriate adoptive family can be found. It may be you, but they would be remiss in their duty to the child if they didn't subject you to the same rigorous questioning that all prospective adopters face. I know for sure we were questioned extensively about every element of our lives, professional and personal, and some of the stuff they came out with was quite frankly outrageous. They picked up on everything, from the art we displayed in our home to the fact that our cat "never got to feel the sunshine on her back" (because she is an indoor cat.) However, we saw it for what it was- an opportunity for them to see how we would react under pressure and criticism, and we decided as a couple beforehand how we would respond as much as possible, and to have counter arguments available to show we would mitigate those risks and how we could turn it to the advantage. (For example, our cat feels the sunshine through the windows, has plenty of enrichment AND also doesn't get run over because she is dumb as a bag of rockswith street smarts). We emailed to check our assessing social worker wasn't allergic to cats, moved the feeding bowls under the counter for her visits and made a point to remove her from worktops if she went on them during visits because some people are funny about that stuff. We hoovered before the social worker visited so there was no cat hair on the sofa. We checked with her if she was ok with cats and even though she was, we then discreetly shut her (the cat!) in the bedroom so that the social worker wasn't constantly bothered for pets and didn't leave our house covered in cat hair. We kept as much stuff as neutral as possible during the process, and tried our hardest to respond in the way that we wanted to be seen. I'm not saying that this was all 100% necessary, I'm just highlighting that it is also not 100% unusual amongst adoptive parents to be considering how their environment is presented and how that might reflect on their attitudes towards child rearing, so I would be considering this when you are considering your response. I think social workers know that it is not necessarily true life with a child, but then again, it's about the adopters willingness to put in the effort to be reflective of the needs of other people and how this could translate to a child's life.
It is a hard balance to strike, because you want to give a genuine understanding of who you are as a family, but you also want to put your best foot forward. I say all of the things I do above not because I want to add to your worry, but to get you to consider potential alternative interpretations for her comments. It can all feel very personal, but if you remove yourself from the situation, it can make their comments less hurtful.
Try not to get too worked up about it. It is frustrating, but the process is designed to elicit their and your own understanding of your weaknesses, and I will say upon reflection that our social worker hit the nail on the head for several of our weaknesses, although we weren't able to admit it at the time. I often wish we could see her again and say thank you because her lines of enquiry and pointed comments highlighted to us exactly what our children do to wind us up, or wear us out. Nobody likes being challenged on their capabilities as a parent, but they are just doing their job to find the most appropriate placement for any potential child at the centre of it.