Dullinger et al. (PNAS, 2013) showed that current proportions of threatened species in European countries are more correlated to socio-economic pressures calculated a century ago than to current socio-economic pressures. These results could have important impacts on future political decisions, yet the statistical analyses used may be strongly impacted by pseudo-replication and over-dispersion of data. I reanalysed Dullinger et al.'s data using generalised linear mixed models accounting for pseudo-replication and over-dispersion. These new statistical models indicated that socio-economic pressures had a much less clear impact on proportions of threatened species than indicated by Dullinger et al. In many cases, the effects of socio-economic pressures even vanished. Dullinger et al. (2013)'s results are actually much less "considerable" than their paper implies and therefore should be viewed with caution. Ecologists should more often incorporate pseudo-replication and overdispersion in their statistical analyses.