It's A Hedgehog!

In Sonic X, the episode where they reveal themselves to the public, Sonic is seen on the X Tornado on live TV. And what does the announcer say?
"It looks like a...blue...hedgehog!" or something along those lines.
My question is:
How the hell do they know that he's a hedgehog?
For starters, there aren't even hedgehogs in the United States of America, and that's obviously where the English (and probably the Japanese as well) version takes place (proof is them going to a place exactly like and with a quite similar name to "Hollywood."). Second, unless you know that he is a hedgehog from the start, he doesn't even look like one! When I first saw him, I thought he was some kind of mutant cat (who lacks whiskers and who has a very short tail). If they haven't even heard his name before, how in the world were they supposed to know that it was a hedgehog?
This happens many times in the show. For example, in the second episode, a man on the news says, "It was this tall"--holding his hand up to about a meter off the ground, how tall Sonic is--"and looked like some kind of blue hedgehog."
Please, tell me your opinion on this confusing matter. I've had it with these people, who have probably never even seen a hedgehog in the wild, knowing exactly what Sonic is.

I've seen a hedgehog, and I owned one for a while. Sonic looks nothing like one, so that's probably why he was going to be a 'Needle-Mouse'.

So yeah, there are hedgehogs in America, just not very popular or well known. And yeah, it is in America, because Sonic runs by a freeway sign in Arizona once.
As for the topic, someone obviously messed up. After all, even in Sonic's world they can't tell he's a hedgehog if they don't know what a hedgehog is. Like Erazor.

So they admit they're terrible at game character art. Hm..

I had a dream that I found a talking hedgehog and kept him as a pet. It was actually a normal hedgehog...I found him inside a water spewing volcano with a cave in it at the back of my school. He didn't want to go back in, because there was a bat in there and he was afraid of bats...so I put him inside my locker with crackers and water until the end of my school day. That was a pretty strange dream.

Now is where I back away slowly.