The present study shows that Asian elephants can be trained to respond to a given odor and that their olfactory learning performance is equally good or even better, than other species tested in similar studies before. The discrimination performance of the elephants regarding structurally related odorants, decreased with increasing structural similarity of the odorants, but the animals could still discriminate between aliphatic acetic esters even when they only differed by one carbon chain length. The long-term odor memory of the elephants also proved to be excellent in that they successfully remembered the reward value of previously learned odor stimuli after up to 16 weeks of recess in testing. The method applied in this study has been shown to be an effective technique to assess the discrimination ability of elephants for a variety of odorants. The method involved no compulsion or punishment, which is beneficial from both an animal welfare perspective and from public concern. The method can easily be used to further investigate the olfactory capabilities of elephants and to gain knowledge about the importance of olfaction in a wide variety of contexts, such as foraging, social, or human-elephant associations. To better understand the chemical world of elephants, the sensitivity and discrimination ability for other biologically relevant odors should first of all be further examined.