[HoneyBadger]

Well, I hate to tell you, Llamabeast, but everything that exists, that we have knowledge of, is what we decide it is.

Plants and animals both have a list of characteristics that define them. If a given creature meets the definition of an "animal", then it's an animal. If it meets the definition of a "plant", then it's a plant. If it only subscribes to the definition of a "bacterium", then that's what it is, which still means that bacteria evolved and split into families over time, and some of those families came before plants, and some of them came after.

Fire, for that matter, meets most of the requirements to be defined as "living". It eats, reproduces, produces waste, requires oxygen. The only things that I can think of offhand that separate it dramatically from every living thing on the Earth is that it doesn't require water and has no cellular or DNA structure that we recognise. So perhaps it's an alien lifeform. Certainly other forms of alien life that have been espoused have been more far-fetched.

I suppose I should have said "heterotroph" instead of "animal", because it would fit what I mean a little more clearly, but it's a little tricky to nail down any specific trait, when we're trying to make classifications of various evolutionary quantities and qualities, over the billions of years this discussion requires. So I say "animal" in opposition to "plant".

Regardless, I'm still pretty sure that multicellular, eucaryotic animals evolved before plants did, and that plants aren't all that far removed from us, compared to several other branches of DNA coded life, on our particular branch of the Evolutionary tree.