How many rounds of 12-gauge shotshells do you fire each year? If you are a typical wingshooter, less than a case will probably get you through a busy season. On the other hand, if you are fortunate enough to occasionally enjoy the incredible dove shooting offered south of the border in Argentina, your annual shell count will most definitely increase by leaps and bounds. The doves there never migrate, and since breeding is virtually continuous, they nest five or more times each year. That, along with a mild climate, an abundance of food available from thousands of acres of cultivated crops, and the almost total absence of predators, causes year-round numbers that have to be seen to be believed.

The Cordoba province is an excellent example. Less than one-third the size of California, it contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 million birds, with some of the vast farms there called home by as many as 1,000 doves per acre.

Equally incredible is the fact that for several decades thousands of Americans have traveled to Argentina each year to shoot thousands of doves, and no study I'm aware of has shown any impact whatsoever on their population. Whereas we American hunters consider the dove to be a valuable game bird, some Argentine farmers classify them as pests capable of severe crop damage. As one farm owner put it to me sometime back, "The dove is to us what the prairie dog is to ranchers in the American West."

There is, I must add, one big difference. Whereas prairie dogs are seldom if ever eaten by humans, many of the doves harvested by shotgunners in Argentina are consumed by villagers who are happy to add a bit more protein to their diets.

With this information in mind, it should be easier for those who have never been to Argentina to understand how it is quite common to shoot more rounds of ammo in a few days there than in several years or perhaps even a lifetime here at home. Our shoot in March of this year was a good example. We were there to wring out the Vinci shotgun from Benelli and were in fact, the first people outside the company to see the new gun.

When it comes to torture-testing a shotgun, no other place on earth equals the high-volume shooting of Argentina, so we were in the right place to see what the Vinci was made of. And we decided to make it as tough on the gun as possible.

As is usually the case in Argentina, a staff member of the outfitter was assigned the task of cleaning and lubricating all shotguns at the end of each day's shoot, but we asked that our guns not be touched in order to see how they would hold up to not only a tremendous amount of shooting in a very short time but to neglect as well. On top of that, it was a bit windy each day, and dust managed to find its way into every crack and crevice of our guns.

So how did the Vinci hold up to all that abuse? Read on.

I shot for around six hours on each of three consecutive days, and at the end of all the excitement, my fired shell count was exactly 6,375 rounds. On the first day out, I fired 2,200 rounds with not a single malfunction of the gun. That's 88 boxes of shells without a single bobble!

About two hours into the second day, I experienced two failures to eject, at which point I applied a drop of oil to the rotating locking lugs of the bolt and another drop into the locking lug recesses of the barrel. From there on I repeated the lube job every 50 boxes of shells, and it was clear sailing for the rest of that day and on through the next.

I am totally convinced that had I also applied those two drops of oil on the first day, I would have gotten through the entire shoot without a single malfunction. Anyone who does not consider such performance from a shotgun truly remarkable has yet to shoot doves in Argentina, has no experience with autoloading shotguns, or both.