Nature & Animals Quote by Mike Royko

Royko’s joke works because it pretends to be polite while smuggling in a moral flamethrower. He opens with the soft, contemporary-sounding language of tolerance - “a personal choice,” “don’t want to sway anyone” - as if he’s moderating a panel on lifestyle preferences. Then he snaps the mask off with the grotesque pivot: not only is the act unthinkable, but he’s willing to treat it as normal enough to warrant a “cooking tip.” That whiplash is the point. The humor isn’t just shock; it’s the way he weaponizes faux-neutrality to expose how absurd “live and let live” becomes when applied to something that clearly demands judgment.

The bell is a perfect detail: domestic, faintly adorable, and totally out of place in a culinary context. It yanks the reader from abstraction into specificity, forcing you to picture an actual pet - not an idea, not a cultural debate. The tip is “obvious,” he says, which adds another layer of satire: he’s mocking the way public commentary can slide into procedural advice while dodging the ethical core.

Contextually, Royko was a columnist with a talent for puncturing official language and public pieties. This is classic Royko: take a sanctimonious posture of balance, push it one step past sanity, and let the reader feel the rot in the rhetoric. The subtext is clear: some “choices” aren’t just choices, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of moral failure.