Didn't a number of Hannibal's elephants freeze to death?
All but one died before he reached Italy
Sure, but think of how many steaks his army must have enjoyed from that.
If memory serves, only a few of the elephants made it, but dealing with elephant warfare was a Roman specialty, such that the whole idea was pretty much abandoned. There's an interesting anecdote about the last use of them, at the Battle of Thapsus, in the HBO series "Rome".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_elephant
Elephant taming (not full domestication, they were still captured in the wild) began in the Indus Valley civilization around 4,000 years ago. The first species to be tamed was thus the Asian elephant, for agricultural ends. The first military application of elephants dates from around 1100 BC in Vedic India, which is mentioned in several Vedic hymns from this era. Shang China may have primitively used elephants for military purposes around the same time as it is known that elephants lived around the Yellow River[1], and were tamed.