Elephants can be found in various captive facilities such as a zoo, sanctuary, circus, or camp, usually under veterinary supervision. They can be used for educational, entertainment, or work purposes.

The earliest evidence of captive elephants dates to the Indus Valley Civilization about 4,500 years ago. Since then, captive elephants have been used around the world in war, ceremony, and for labor and entertainment. Captive elephants have been kept in animal collections for at least 3,500 years. The first elephant arrived in North America in 1796. London Zoo, the first scientific zoo, housed elephants beginning in 1831.

Before the 1980s, zoos obtained their elephants by capturing them from the wild. Increased restrictions on the capture of wild elephants and dwindling wild populations caused zoos to turn to captive breeding. The first successful captive birth in North America of an Asian elephant occurred at Oregon Zoo in 1962, while the first African elephant captive birth occurred at Knoxville Zoological Gardens in 1978. Today, most zoos obtain their elephants primarily through breeding, though occasionally zoos will obtain elephants from semi-captive work camps in Asia or rescue elephants that would otherwise be culled in Africa. Without an increase in birth rates or an influx of wild elephants, practitioners fear that captive elephant populations could become non-viable within 50 years.

In 2006, 286 elephants were kept in American zoos (147 African elephants and 139 Asian elephants). Nearly one in three Asian elephants lives in captivity—about 15,000 in total—mostly in work camps, temples, and ecotourism sites in the countries in which they naturally occur. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates the total population of Asian elephants in the wild is 40,000 to 50,000, and that of African elephants in the wild is 400,000 to 600,000.

Tame elephants have been recorded since the Indus Valley civilization around 2,000 BCE. With mahouts, they have been used as working animals in forestry, as war elephants (by commanders such as Hannibal), for cultural and ceremonial use (such as temple elephants), as a method of execution, for public displays such as circus elephants, in elephant polo and in zoological gardens.

The expression white elephant derives from a white elephant being considered sacred and therefore disqualified from useful work, yet posing a large ownership cost. The origin of the expression is from the story that the kings of Siam gave white elephants as a gift to courtiers they disliked, in order to ruin the recipient by the great expense incurred in maintaining the animal.

Elephants have the largest brains of all land animals, and ever since the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, have been renowned for their cognitive skills, with behavioural patterns shared with humans. Pliny the Elder described the animal as being closest to a human in sensibilities. They also have a longer lifespan than most livestock. Elephants exhibit a wide variety of behaviors, including those associated with grief, learning, allomothering, mimicry, play, altruism, use of tools, compassion, cooperation, self-awareness, memory, vengeance, and language.

In the wild, elephant herds usually consist of a matriarch who leads a stable group of related adult females and their young offspring. When male elephants reach maturity (usually by the age of 12) they disperse from the herds and live on their own or join groups called bachelor herds, where they associate with other males during the times of the year that they are not sexually active. When males are sexually active, they enter a state called musth, during which time they roam widely, searching for available females. During this time, they are extremely aggressive toward other males they encounter.