Come on, I prefer cats but the reason people prefer dogs is because they do consent to the kinds of interaction dog-lovers want to have with their pets. If someone doesn’t like cats because cats often don’t want to be petted all the time it just means that person wants a pet who wants to be petted.
Also I do things to my cats without their consent all the time: I give them medicine they don’t want, I use a vacuum cleaner, and I move them from places I don’t want them to be. They are animals, not humans, and how I interact with them is not a model for how I interact with humans.