Mumtaz, Uttara and Phulwanti at the Alipore zoo. A file picture

The Alipore zoo has finally bid adieu to its three adult elephants but only after two of them threw some jumbo-sized tantrums.

Mumtaz, Uttara and Phulwanti, among the oldest inmates of the zoo, left in three lorries for Jaldapara National Park in Jalpaiguri around 11pm on Friday, leaving behind plenty of memories.

The elephants reached their new home on Sunday evening.

Mumtaz and Uttara put up a tough fight while they were being forced to leave their home for 20 years — stomping a hole on a lorry floor and pulling a backhoe loader that had been brought to pull them.

Mumtaz carried on the fight on the road, too.

“We have transported many animals, including tigers and lions, but these three drove us crazy. We were almost begging them to get on the lorries and leave,” said a zoo official.

The Central Zoo Authority had in 2009 asked the Alipore zoo to shift the elephants following a decision that the giant animals would not be kept in enclosures.

But zoo officials had no clue how to transport the three untrained elephants, each of which weighed between 2,000 and 2,500kg.

In January this year, a team of trainers was brought from Kaziranga in Assam to train the elephants. The elephants initially refused to obey any of the commands but gradually picked up the basics.

The process of shifting Mumtaz, Uttara and Phulwanti started on Thursday, after the arrival of two baby elephants — Titi and Rani — from Jaldapara, along with a rhino kid.

The authorities had set up a temporary ramp in the enclosure to help the elephants get on the lorries.

A team of 70 — comprising senior officials, veterinarians, trainers and mahouts — was put together to ensure a smooth shift.

Over the past week the mahouts had been trying to keep the trio in good humour by giving them huge quantities of bananas, jaggery and sattu to gorge on.

But Mumtaz, Uttara and Phulwanti had different plans.

The three lorries that were to transport them to north Bengal and the backhoe loader entered the zoo premises around 7am.

Mumtaz, the eldest of the three, was the first in line to board the lorry.

“The plan was that the backhoe loader would pull her towards a lorry from the enclosure while a mahout would keep cajoling her. But what happened was exactly the opposite. Mumtaz started pulling the backhoe loader towards her,” recalled an official.

Mumtaz’s recalcitrance prompted the authorities to inject tranquiliser into all three elephants. “The medicine subdued their aggression and we could finally make them board the lorries,” said an official.

But that was not the end of the zoo officials’ woes. Immediately after getting on her lorry, Uttara stomped the floor hard, creating a large hole.

“We were not prepared for this. We had to get the hole repaired, which took one-and-a-half hours,” the official said.

A couple of hours after the lorries left, an official at the zoo got a call from a colleague who was accompanying the elephants.

“He told me that Mumtaz was hitting the driver’s cabin from the back. The driver got scared and said he would not drive. We told him to inject her with another dose of tranquiliser,” the official said.

A few hours later, at a toll plaza in Farakka, Mumtaz shocked everybody by breaking an iron fence with her trunk.

“We were in the process of crossing the toll plaza when we heard a loud sound. On checking we found that Mumtaz had uprooted an entire iron fence with her trunk,” said Dipen Kolita, who had headed a six-member team from Assam that had trained the elephants for six months.