If Google Language Tools is to be believed, vermisst means "missing," as opposed to "lost."
To me, missing has a distinctly different meaning than lost—enough so that this picture leads me to wonder why LOST is used instead of MISSING on American bills and ads of this sort. After all, when a child is missing Americans just use MISSING. Most of the times when a child is said to be LOST, it’s actually more accurate to say the kid is FOUND. E.g., an announcement will be made over a public address system instructing parents to meet their "lost" child at such-and-such a place. (And even then, LOST is appropriate in the sense that the "lost child" doesn’t know where he is.)
Long story short, I suspect maybe we use LOST instead of MISSING when posting notices about pets we can’t find because of a cultural or historical tendency to think of them as property.
However, if I had an OED, I’d consult it because surely someone else has already considered the etymologies involved here.
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