This is a strawman. We care about animals because animals have nervous systems and a pain response. Plants have no analog - they cannot feel pain, and have no neurological system to indicate intelligence. Nothing feels pain when you cut off a tree branch. Something feels pain when you break off a lobsters claw or hit a dog.

Additionally, the plants we do eat often evolved to produce food for us. Apple trees and other fruiting plants all evolved to be eaten, so the consumer distributes the seeds in stool. That apple is delicious because the tree had an evolutionary bias to make it delicious so you would eat it. We eat plenty of plants like herbs and cabbages not for that purpose (albeit we did breed cabbages to be mutant and tasty) but an apple is a terrible example of a plant we hurt by eating it.

> Nothing feels pain when you cut off a tree branch

We don't actually know that for certain. We only know that it does not communicate that pain in a method discernable to us.

We define pain as a neurological response. Since plants don't have nerves, they cannot feel pain. They cannot feel.

You argue the semantics in problem domains we don't fully understand. Feelings and sensations only get wishy-washy when you have a developed nervous system, because we cannot accurately predict how said system behaves due to its complexity. But we do know what is actually ascribed to that system, what behaviors it propagates as, and that things without it don't experience it.

We have vernacular in place to express how plants react to stimuli. Sensation, pain, and feeling are not in that vocabulary, because they describe an essential aspect of the animal kingdom, not the plant one.

> No one needs plants to survive either

Completely wrong, and frankly a pretty stupid thing to say. Plants provide the basis for all life on this planet. Without plants, there would be no complete proteins, there would be no essential fatty acids, there would be no sustainable nutrition for humans nor any other being on this planet. What you're saying is straight up silly. Stop.