Christie Rae, I saw your post and it reminded me of an experience I had with some chicks last year.
I was given three chicks (all mixed up breeds - I'm an expat living in a country [Lebanon] where chickens are viewed solely as a source of food - so, any notion of breeds is a bit unheard of; although as far as I can tell they were an EE, Buff Orp-x, and Minorca-x). They were about 3-days old when I was given them and they had come from a local market (so, probably the transport was pretty traumatic, but it definitely didn't involve an airplane ride ;-D).
I made every effort to hold each of the chicks for a little bit every day, I gave them all treats, I built what I called the chicky palace to house them all, everything. Nevertheless one of them, the Minorca-x, had issues. He (it turned out to be a rooster) would peck everybody on the head and try to knock them off the roost- at one point I even caught him holding the EE's head down in the water dish! I immediately separated him, putting him in chicky prison - basically a big plastic bin with a towel on the bottom. He spent three days in chicky prison which seemed to chill him out.
At about 6 weeks we moved the three chicks out of the chicky palace and into our coop in the countryside, which at the time had 5 hens and a rooster. Life went on in a very good way until the mean chick was about 8 months old. All of sudden, he went crazy; we could hardly catch him and he wanted to fight everybody - hens and roosters (fortunately, not us!). After he did a good job of bloodying up himself, his contemporaries (not the head rooster), and any hen that couldn't get away, we decided to get him out of there. We heard about another flock with a much larger coop ~40 hens and only one other rooster; the owner of that flock agreed to take the minorca-x (he was admittedly a very good looking roo). Unfortunately, even the larger more interesting surroundings didn't fix the problem...he went on to kill 3 hens before becoming dinner himself.
I know, it's a really tragic story. As a peace-loving-hippy myself, the idea that any creature could be innately and incorrigibly mean is just devastating. Really if I had read your post before having this experience myself, I would have thought that more love and careful attention would solve everything. Now, however, I really do think there is just some gene/chemical imbalance/something fundamental that makes some chickens mean. I also came to believe from this experience that the chicken itself can't be enjoying life too much if it is always looking for something to fight...so maybe culling isn't as cruel as it sounds (not that I could actually do that myself; clearly my solution was to give the mean bird away).
To end this story on a brighter note, the other two chicks have grown up fantastically one gives ~7 big brown eggs per week and the other is the sweetest rooster I have ever met...we even joke that he is actually a prince turned rooster by a wicked witch
