Schrodinger actually made the famous cat thought experiment as a way of illustrating how irrational the thinking of some of the leading ideas of quantum mechanics are (or at least how many physicists were treating them).
He didn't himself believe the cat was simultaneously alive and dead until observed, he was more or less poking fun at quantum physicists who would believe a particle, for instance, was in two states until observed, or that a photon would take all possible routes around or through a particle or substance when there was equal probability, etc. He was pointing out this is absurd when applied on a macro scale.
However, despite it being a criticism of quantum physics, turned out quantum physicists liked it so much they many started using it as a good way to illustrate the rather difficult concept of quantum superposition. Einstein himself liked it much, and actually got the point, and wrote to him saying, "You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established."
However, I'll also note that you seem to have missed that this was a
thought experiment, not a real experiment that he conducted, and also seem to not be familiar with the actual model he presented which would make all your considerations irrelevant:
Quote:
"One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts."
Note as well that the key is not seeing the cat with the eyes, but "observing", and observation includes all types of possible perception, even indirect (thus, hearing the cat meow, seeing a box move, smelling decaying body, measuring heat signatures, etc are all forms of observation). Regardless, he set up a system where it would be impossible to know whether the cat was dead or not without observing the cat, as that fact was based not on the actions of the cat or any other factor other than atomic decay (and atomic decay is one of the quantum concepts for which this kind of thinking was applied). Again though, he was illustrating a flaw in the way people thought about such matters in that they didn't distinguish between the reality of the matter and what can be experimentally proven.