But the bottom line is that they are not people and they don't think in the way people think. These amazing beings love us and trust us implicitly. It just isn't part of their awareness that they should need to telegraph anything to us in order for their needs to be met or their well-being ensured. They are quite sure that we, as their pack leaders, operate only in their best interest at all times. Emotional selfishness is not a concept in dogdom and they don't know how hard we sometimes have to fight against it ourselves.
Dogs also have no mindset for emotional surrender or giving up.
They have no awareness of the inevitability of death as we do and they have no fear of it. It is fear that so often influences and aggravates our perceptions when we are sick or dying and it becomes impossible to separate the fear out from the actual illness after a while. But that's not the case with dogs. Whatever we observe to be wrong with our sick dogs, it's all illness. And we don't even see the full impact of that until it's at a very advanced point, because it's a dog's nature to endure and to sustain the norm at all costs.