Kweassa,No offense, my friends, but as a longtime animal rights activist, I'm weary of the question of plant suffering. Here is the answer: maybe, just maybe, plants can indeed feel pain. But do you honestly believe they feel pain as much as a more advanced life form, like a dog or cow? Animals have central nervous systems, and as you go up the life chain, from algae to plants to trees to clams to fish to frogs to reptiles and birds to mammals, sensory systems and brains become more complex and presumably, self-awareness and the capacity to suffer advance along with them. Since even vegetarians must kill something -- plants -- in order to eat, we limit our killing only to plants in an effort to minimize the amount of suffering we cause (and I am not convinced that a carrot, for example, really feels pain, but who knows?). Also, if you eat meat, you are not only eating the animal, but indirectly, you're eating all the plants which the animal ate, so you're engaged in even more misery production when you eat meat, than if you only ate plants.
On your second point: I can only speak for myself, but if a poor or less-advanced society can only survive by eating plants AND animals, then I have no complaint. Frankly, in today's world, I can't see too many societies which must eat meat to survive, but for those which do, I won't condemn them. I'm far more concerned with those advanced nations, such as the United States and Korea, where people absolutely have the choice to be vegetarians.
Those are the morality-based answers to your questions. There are environmental, health, and humanitarian reasons for going veggie. McSpotlight talks about them. You can also read about them at www.farmsanctuary.com.
There are other animal rights issues, as you may know. Fur, cosmetics testing, circuses, etc. Check out www.peta.org. if you really want to learn about animal rights.
By the way, I see no moral difference between Koreans eating dogs and Americans eating cows. I know it's a cultural difference. HOWEVER, I am outraged at the practice of some (emphasis on "some") Koreans of torturing dogs by means of slow death, such as slow strangulation, in order to make their meat "tastier" by having the suffering animals excrete adrenalin as they die. If you're going to kill an animal for food, kill it quickly, for God's sake.
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